The Multichannel Campaign Management (MCCM) market is re-inventing itself once again. According to Gartner’s recently published Magic Quadrant for MCCM, it is led by IBM, SAS, Teradata and Oracle (Seibel) and is marked by a re-architecting of solutions by established vendors, and the addition of new functionality by newer entrants.

What Is MCCM?

The changes are not just cosmetic and are aimed at providing a longer reach in the digital marketing space. Established vendors are re-thinking their offerings and adding functionality by acquisitions, while the new entrants are adding offline capabilities through technology development, but also by acquisitions too.

Both are adding analytics to improve decision making around campaigns. Combined, Gartner says, all these changes point to a market that will be characterized by ongoing change in the medium term.

In a two part piece on this vital market space, today we will look how the market is evolving and where it is likely to go, and tomorrow at the companies that are leading the changes as well as those that have the potential to become market leaders in the future.

MCCM, Gartner says, is not so much a single technology as a collection of technologies. It enables businesses to define, orchestrate and communicate offers inbound and outbound to customer segments and across numerous different marketing channels like websites, mobile, social, direct mail, and even call centers.

It comes with functionality for segmentation, campaign execution and campaign workflows and has at its core predictive analytics and campaign optimization. On top of this, vendors have built a number of different functions according to client needs including loyalty management, content management and real-time decision/offer management. It is also tightly integrated with campaign management.

MCCM Market Context

Needless to say, at a time where every sale is hard-won in an economy that is fragile even on good days, enterprises are investing in technologies that may help them close precious deals. Budgets for digital marketing, Gartner says, are growing twice as fast as overall marketing budgets and now count for 25% of the entire marketing spend.

On top of this, new technologies like social and mobile channels create the challenge of engaging with customers in different ways. The result, marketers have to coordinate more channels and more campaigns, creating new challenges for MCCM vendors who have to keep up by adding new functions.

MCCM MQ Criteria

This, then, is the market place that IBM, SAS, Oracle (Seibel) and Teradata are dominating and which SAP is challenging for a Leader’s position.

In this quadrant, leaders are the vendors that have better overall campaign management performance in both basic and advanced campaigns and integration with other digital initiatives. They have high market visibility, high market penetration and strong market momentum.

All the vendors that are listed in the Quadrant can demonstrate the following capabilities:

They must also demonstrate 30 customers using campaign management, 15 new customer wins in the past year and at least 8 client references, along with a cool US$ 15 million in revenues for the year.

MCCM Market Overview

The criteria are tough -- as they are for other Magic Quadrants -- but 17 companies surveyed made it into the Quadrant.

The market at the moment consists of a number of established vendors -- notable here is that all the companies in the Leaders quadrant and are considered well established started initially by developing full-function, on premises software with a heavy reliance on mail and email marketing.

The new vendors that have entered the space in recent times tend to offer cloud solutions that have less functionality, but which are focused on digital marketing, particularly in the social and mobile channels. All, without exception, are re-thinking their offerings as their clients’ need change, adding functionality like advanced predictive analytics and offline abilities.

The result is a market of enterprises that are currently looking for offline and online channel functionality. Vendors are responding to that by offering this kind of functionality along with new ways to deliver this functionality with better value offerings.

1. Established Technologies

Despite ongoing predictions that email will disappear as the victim of growth in social media and instant messaging, it just keeps growing and getting better as new services like Outlook.com are introduced.

Over the years it really has received a lot of bad press, not because of the functionality, but because of the companies that are using it, especially marketing companies under the mistaken belief that somehow, someway, spam works.

To counter that, and in face of the indisputable evidence that email is not going anywhere soon, most reputable marketing companies are adding analytics to better target their campaigns. Analytics can identify who is receptive to email and what kind of campaigns are going to work. MCCM vendors have taken this on board and are currently adding analytics to their email offerings.

Web content management is also an “older’ content technology that is undergoing a bit of a revival as content marketing grows. Content marketing is the creation, curation, managing and distribution of contextual content across multiple channels.

As marketing content becomes more sophisticated, enterprises need advanced functions for re-purposing content and changing content based on the profile of audiences, and even responding with appropriate content in real-time. The result is Web CMS functionality and link-ups between MCCM vendors and Web CMS vendors.

2. New Technologies

Social networks are now key channels for marketers. Advocacy marketing is enhancing loyalty marketing techniques and many MCCM vendors are entering partnerships with social media vendors and agencies. Video and animation has also become important and is now the channel of choice for viral marketing campaigns. Here again MCCPMM vendors are looking for partners to help them with this.

The result of these new channels is that real-time capabilities have become increasingly important with marketers extending multichannel marketing from purely outbound campaigns to inbound marketing in the form of real-time offering management and decision making.

However, all these new technologies come at a price and as budgets increase, digital marketers are under increasing pressure to show the connection between revenue growth and digital marketing spend. As a result then, they now also need attribution metrics to optimize their spending. But, Gartner says, many MCCM vendors are putting this off on the long finger because of the complexity of these technologies for each of the channels involved.

Overall, the growing complexity of multi channel marketing is a problem for most vendors and while many are willing and have introduced some basic initiatives, many stagnate without moving to the next level. MCCM vendors are responding by helping marketers move onto more-sophisticated projects by creating scorecards and templates for campaigns that encode best practices.

Tomorrow we will look at the vendors that are meeting these challenges, and how they are doing it.

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